The 4 Best Traps Exercises

Everyone wants a good set of traps – it’s what makes your back look good and it gives you a lot more strength. When it comes to these muscles, you will need to have good control over how you develop them, so without further ado, here are four of the best trap exercises to help you with that goal.

1. Dumbbell Shrug

Dumbbell shrugs are really good because they put far less stress on your shoulder joints as opposed to barbell shrugs, which will make your joints hurt if you work out with a lot of intensity. This way, your shoulders won’t rotate to hold the bar, and remain in a single position during the entire exercise. To perform the perfect dumbbell shrug, take two dumbbells with your arms down by your sides, facing each other and fully extended. Shrug your shoulders as high as you can, take a breath at the top, contract your muscles and slowly lower the dumbbells back down.

2. Face Pull

If you want to make your trapezoid muscles the envy of your gym, you need to do face pulls because they will improve your scapular movement as well as your trap strength. Here’s how to do them – take a rope and attach it to a cable machine. Grasp the rope with both of your hands and pull towards your head while separating your hands. Your upper arms will need to be parallel to the ground and your elbows will have to stay higher than your palms at all times. Pause at the top of the movement for a second and return the rope to its original position.

3. Behind-the-Back Barbell Shrug

We already had a set of shrugs on this list, so why is this here? Simple! Behind-the-back barbell shrugs put intensity on a number of muscle groups at the same time – your upper and middle traps as well as your levator scapulae muscle. This exercise will help you speed up your back growth like no other.

4. Barbell Row

It doesn’t matter if you like this exercise or not because it’s one of the best for making your back stronger and more stable. Barbell rows strengthen your middle and lower traps, your rhomboids as well as your latissimus dorsi. The former two will stabilize your scapula, which you definitely need if you want to be a weightlifter. If you don’t work on this, your shoulders will become unstable, which will put a dent in your progress because of the lack of strength and mobility that follows, but you also raise your chances of injury.